News Aggregator

Building AI Agents With .NET: A Practical Guide

Aggregated on: 2025-08-18 14:14:39

As software systems evolve, there's a growing demand for applications that are not just reactive but proactive, adaptive, and intelligent. This is where Agentic AI comes in. Unlike traditional AI that simply follows instructions, Agentic AI involves autonomous agents that can perceive, reason, act, and learn just like intelligent assistants. In this article, we’ll explore how to bring Agentic AI concepts into the world of .NET development, creating smarter, self-directed applications.

Logging MCP Protocol When Using stdio, Part I

Aggregated on: 2025-08-18 13:59:39

Logging MCP Protocol When Using stdio If you haven’t heard of MCP — the Model Context Protocol — you’ve probably been living under a rock. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is becoming widely recognized, standardizing how applications provide context to LLMs. It barely needs an introduction anymore. Still, for the sake of completeness, let me borrow selectively from the official MCP site. Do take a moment to explore the well-explained pages if you're new to MCP. MCP is an open protocol that standardizes how applications provide context to LLMs. It’s designed to help developers build agents and complex workflows on top of LLMs. Since LLMs often need to interact with external data and tools, MCP offers:

10 Essential Bash Scripts to Boost DevOps Efficiency

Aggregated on: 2025-08-18 13:14:39

Automation is a major aspect of the DevOps workflow, enhancing efficiency, and Bash script is one of the oldest and powerful tools for achieving this automation. Bash scripts help engineers and system admins to eliminate mundane workflow, repetitive tasks, and reduce errors across multiple environments. With its simplicity and adaptability in many Unix-based systems, the Bash script is used in day-to-day operations without the overhead of complex automation tooling. In this article, you will learn 10 essential Bash scripts that can boost your DevOps productivity. These range from automating simple CI/CD DevOps workflow, backups, and Docker container management to monitoring system health and environment provisioning.

React Server Components in Next.js 15: A Deep Dive

Aggregated on: 2025-08-18 12:14:39

React 19.1 and Next.js 15.3.2 have arrived, and React Server Components (RSC) are now officially a stable part of the React ecosystem and the Next.js framework. In this article, we'll dive into what server components are, how they work under the hood, and what they mean for developers. We'll cover the RSC architecture, data loading and caching, integration with Next.js (including the new app/ routing, the use client directive, layouts), and examine limitations and pitfalls. Of course, we'll also explore practical examples and nuances — from performance to testing and security — and finish by comparing RSC to alternative approaches like Remix, Astro, and others. Why Do We Need Server Components? Until recently, React apps were either rendered entirely on the client or partially on the server (via SSR) with hydration handled on the client. Neither approach is perfect: full client-side rendering (CSR) can overload the browser with heavy JavaScript, while server-side rendering (SSR) still requires full hydration of interactive components on the client — which adds significant overhead. React Server Components offer a new solution: move parts of the UI logic and rendering to the server, sending pre-rendered HTML to the browser and sprinkling in interactivity only where needed. In other words, we can write React components that run exclusively on the server — they can directly query a database or filesystem, generate HTML, and stream that UI to the browser. The client receives the already-rendered output and loads only the minimal JavaScript required for interactive parts of the app.

Architecting Compound AI Systems for Scalable Enterprise Workflows

Aggregated on: 2025-08-18 11:29:39

The convergence of generative AI, large language models (LLMs), and multi-agent orchestration has given rise to a transformative concept: compound AI systems. These architectures extend beyond individual models or assistants, representing ecosystems of intelligent agents that collaborate to deliver business outcomes at scale. As enterprises pursue hyperautomation, continuous optimization, and personalized engagement, designing agentic workflows becomes a critical differentiator. This article examines the design of compound AI systems with an emphasis on modular AI agents, secure orchestration, real-time data integration, and enterprise governance. The aim is to provide solution architects, engineering leaders, and digital transformation executives with a practical blueprint for building and scaling intelligent agent ecosystems across various domains, including customer service, IT operations, marketing, and field automation.

My First Practical Agentic App: Using Firebase and Generative AI to Automate Office Tasks

Aggregated on: 2025-08-15 20:29:38

Why I Built This App Being a full-stack engineer, I was curious about agentic applications — tools that propose and act, rather than just waiting for the next command. Instead of a showy travel itinerary robot, I asked myself: “What’s one piece of software I’d be thrilled to have every morning?”

Java JEP 400 Explained: Why UTF-8 Became the Default Charset

Aggregated on: 2025-08-15 19:29:38

A JDK Enhancement Proposal (JEP) is a formal process used to propose and document improvements to the Java Development Kit. It ensures that enhancements are thoughtfully planned, reviewed, and integrated to keep the JDK modern, consistent, and sustainable over time. Since its inception, many JEPs have introduced significant language and runtime features that shape the evolution of Java. One such important proposal, JEP 400, introduced in JDK 18 in 2022, standardizes UTF-8 as the default charset, addressing long-standing issues with platform-dependent encoding and improving Java’s cross-platform reliability. Traditionally, Java’s I/O API, introduced in JDK 1.1, includes classes like FileReader and FileWriter that read and write text files. These classes rely on a Charset to correctly interpret byte data. When a charset is explicitly passed to the constructor, like in:

Green DevOps: Building Sustainable Pipelines and Energy-Aware Cloud Deployments

Aggregated on: 2025-08-15 18:29:38

The Uncomfortable Truth About Our Code Here's something we rarely talk about in stand-ups or sprint retrospectives: every single line of code we write has an environmental cost. That innocent-looking commit? It triggers builds that consume electricity. Those deployment pipelines humming away in the background? They're burning through server resources 24/7. The AI models we're so excited about training? They're carbon emission factories wrapped in cutting-edge algorithms. I've been working in tech for over a decade, and I've watched our industry transform from scrappy startups running on bare metal to cloud-first organizations spinning up resources like it's going out of style. But here's what kept me awake last night: we've created a digital ecosystem that's environmentally unsustainable, and most of us don't even realize it.

How to Architect a Compliant Cloud for Healthcare Clients (Azure Edition)

Aggregated on: 2025-08-15 17:14:38

Designing cloud infrastructure for healthcare isn’t just about uptime and cost; it’s about protecting sensitive patient data and satisfying regulatory requirements like HIPAA and HITRUST. When we were tasked with migrating a healthcare client's legacy workloads into Azure, we knew every decision had to be auditable, encrypted, and policy-controlled. This guide walks through how we built a compliant Azure environment for healthcare clients using Microsoft-native tools, shared responsibility awareness, and practical implementation techniques that held up under third-party audits.

How to Build ML Experimentation Platforms You Can Trust?

Aggregated on: 2025-08-15 16:14:38

Machine learning models don’t succeed in isolation — they rely on robust systems to validate, monitor, and explain their behavior. Top tech companies such as Netflix, Meta, and Airbnb have invested heavily in building scalable experimentation and ML platforms that help them detect drift, uncover bias, and maintain high-quality user experiences. But building trust in machine learning doesn’t come from a single dashboard. It comes from a layered, systematic approach to observability.

Consumer Ecosystem Design for Efficient Configuration Based Product Rollouts

Aggregated on: 2025-08-15 15:14:38

In a regulated and complex industry like Insurance, one of the biggest challenges facing speed to market is the complexity in regulations and the state variations. Both the variations and complexities cause the code to become unmanageable and complex with all sorts of conditional statements and business logic creeping into consumer applications, making it extremely hard to manage or develop. This is where distributed architecture/components shine allowing not only to break down piece into smaller manageable parts but also reducing single point of failures. How to effectively distribute the architecture is where the key lies in whether a system will truly be configurable to allow for speed to market.

Virtualized Containers vs. Bare Metal: The Winner Is…

Aggregated on: 2025-08-15 14:14:38

The blanket statement that bare metal is superior to containers in VMs for running containerized infrastructure, such as Kubernetes, no longer holds true. Each has pros and cons, so the right choice depends heavily on specific workload requirements and operational context. Bare metal was long touted as the obvious choice for organizations seeking both the best compute performance and even superior security when hosting containers compared to VMs. But this disparity in performance has slowly eroded. For security, it is now hard to make the case for bare metal’s benefits over those of VMs, except for very niche use cases.

Amazon EMRFS vs HDFS: Which One is Right for Your Big Data Needs?

Aggregated on: 2025-08-15 13:29:38

Amazon EMR is a managed service from AWS for big data processing. EMR is used to run enterprise-scale data processing tasks using distributed computing. It breaks down tasks into smaller chunks and uses multiple computers for processing. It uses popular big data frameworks like Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark. EMR can be set up easily, enabling organizations to swiftly analyze and process large volumes of data without the hassle of managing servers. The two primary options for storing data in Amazon EMR are Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and Elastic MapReduce File System (EMRFS).

Data Pipeline Architectures: Lessons from Implementing Real-Time Analytics

Aggregated on: 2025-08-15 12:29:38

Not long ago, real-time analytics was considered a luxury reserved for tech giants and hyper-scale startups—fraud detection in milliseconds, live GPS tracking for logistics, or instant recommendation engines that adapt as users browse. Today, the landscape has shifted dramatically.

Agile Teams Thrive on Collective Strengths, Not Sameness

Aggregated on: 2025-08-15 11:14:38

“Everyone should be able to do everything” is a misquoted Agile myth. Agile Scrum teams are intentionally cross-functional, meaning they include the necessary mix of skills—such as development, testing, design, DevOps, and business analysis—to deliver a working product increment. The goal is to minimize handoffs and dependencies that delay the delivery of value.

How IoT Devices Communicate With Alexa, Google Assistant, and HomeKit — A Developer’s Deep Dive

Aggregated on: 2025-08-14 20:14:37

As software developers, we're immersed in a world of interconnected systems. From microservices orchestrating complex business logic to distributed databases humming along, the art of inter-process communication is our daily bread. Yet, there's one ubiquitous form of interaction that often feels like magic to the layperson (and sometimes to us): the seamless dance between our smart home gadgets and voice assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple HomeKit. When you simply utter, "Alexa, dim the living room lights," and the room responds, what intricate choreography is truly unfolding in the cloud and on the edge? It's more than just a convenience; it's a profound shift in how humans interact with technology. For us, the engineers behind the curtain, understanding this intricate communication isn't just academic. It's critical for building robust, secure, and user-friendly smart home experiences. It challenges us to bridge the digital and physical realms, crafting intuitive interfaces for the world around us.

Cloud Data Engineering for Smarter Healthcare Marketing

Aggregated on: 2025-08-14 19:14:37

Healthcare marketing is going through a major transformation, with data processing happening at a tremendous speed. Organizations are prioritizing well-structured data to understand patient behavior, leveraging cloud data engineering. Why is this shift happening now? Because the healthcare industry generates 2,314 exabytes of data per year, yet 90% of it goes unused. It includes patient interactions, EHRs, claims, CRM logs, web behavior, and more.

A Comprehensive Comparison of Serverless Databases and Dedicated Database Servers in the Cloud

Aggregated on: 2025-08-14 18:14:37

The cloud computing landscape has revolutionized how businesses manage their data, offering unprecedented scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. Within this landscape, the choice between traditional dedicated database servers and the emerging paradigm of serverless databases represents a pivotal decision with significant implications for infrastructure management, performance optimization, and overall operational efficiency. The Shifting Sands of Data Management: A Comprehensive Comparison of Serverless Databases and Dedicated Database Servers in the Cloud

The Next Frontier in Cybersecurity: Securing AI Agents Is Now Critical and Most Companies Aren’t Ready

Aggregated on: 2025-08-14 17:29:37

You can’t secure what you don’t understand, and right now, most enterprises don’t understand the thing running half their operations. Autonomous AI agents are here. They’re booking appointments, executing trades, handling customer complaints, and doing it all without waiting for human permission. But while businesses are busy chasing the productivity boost, they’re sleepwalking into the next generation of cyber threats. In 2024, we passed a quiet milestone: AI agents started negotiating, transacting, and integrating across APIs with minimal human input. These aren’t smart scripts. They’re adaptive, goal-seeking digital operators. And they’re already poking holes in the security assumptions that have held up for the past two decades.

Is Codex the End of Boilerplate Code?

Aggregated on: 2025-08-14 16:29:37

Boilerplate code has always been the background noise of software development. It’s like lining up bricks of a house. It's boring, repetitive, and dull, but always necessary. Whether it’s setting up a web server, writing authentication flows, or configuring logging, most senior developers can do it with their eyes closed. Yet, they still have to do it. But OpenAI’s Codex is here to change that.

Reclaiming the Architect’s Role in the SDLC

Aggregated on: 2025-08-14 15:14:37

Over the past decade and a half, following the general shift away from the waterfall model, the industry has increasingly underutilized the expertise of software architects. The pendulum swung almost to the point of making any design work feel redundant. Strong software design and continuous architecture validation are essential for building efficient and reliable systems in real-world applications. Development teams should embed these practices in every iteration of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) — dynamic enough to guide architectural decisions yet lightweight enough not to slow development down. The same goes for documentation: it’s a valuable part of design work, but many modern engineering teams struggle to create and maintain it effectively.

No More ETL: How Lakebase Combines OLTP, Analytics in One Platform

Aggregated on: 2025-08-14 14:14:37

Databricks' Lakebase, launched in June 2025, is a serverless Postgres database purpose-built to support modern operational applications and AI workloads—all within the Lakehouse architecture. It stands apart from legacy OLTP systems by unifying real-time transactions and lakehouse-native analytics, all without complex provisioning or data pipelines. Under the hood, Lakebase is PostgreSQL-compatible, which means developers can use existing tools like psql, SQLAlchemy, and pgAdmin, as well as familiar extensions like PostGIS for spatial data and pgvector for embedding-based similarity search—a growing requirement for AI-native applications. It combines the familiarity of Postgres with advanced capabilities powered by Databricks' unified platform.

How OpenTelemetry Improved Its Code Integrity for Arm64 by Working With Ampere®

Aggregated on: 2025-08-14 13:44:37

Snapshot Challenge: Software developers and IT managers need instrumentation and metrics to measure software behavior. When developers and DevOps professionals assume that software will run on a single hardware architecture, they may be overlooking architecture-specific behavior. Arm64-based servers, including the Ampere® Altra® family of processors, offer performance improvements and energy savings over x86, but the underlying architecture is Arm64, which behaves differently to the x86 architecture at a very low level. At the time, mid-2023, OpenTelemetry did not formally support Arm64 deployments. As the popularity of Arm64 instances increased because of their competitive price-performance, monitoring those systems was critical for observability vendors. Solution: To help rectify that situation, Ampere Computing donated Ampere Altra-powered servers to the OpenTelemetry team. With these processors, the team could begin retrofitting their telemetry instrumentation for Arm64, and adapting their Node.js, Java, and Python code for the Arm64 architecture.

Beyond Netflix: Why Fintech Recommendations Need a Completely Different Playbook

Aggregated on: 2025-08-14 13:14:37

Let’s dive into how to create a recommendation system for fintech—hearing for the first time? But don’t worry, I’ll break it down into bite-sized pieces. The Unique Nature of Financial Recommendations First off, financial recommendations are a whole different ballgame compared to those you’d get from Netflix or an online store. If Netflix suggests a bad movie, it’s just 90 minutes wasted. But if a fintech app makes a bad investment suggestion, folks could lose their hard-earned savings.

The Myth of In-Place Patching: Unpacking Protocol Buffers, FieldMasks, and the "Last Field Wins" Conundrum

Aggregated on: 2025-08-14 12:14:37

Data serialization frameworks like Google Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) have become indispensable. They offer compact binary formats and efficient parsing, making them ideal for everything from inter-service communication to persistent data storage. But when it comes to updating just a small part of an already serialized data blob, a common question arises: can we "patch" it directly, avoiding the overhead of reading, modifying, and rewriting the entire thing? The short answer, for most practical purposes, is no. While Protobuf provides clever mechanisms that seem to offer direct patching, the reality is more nuanced. Let's dive into why the full "read-modify-write" cycle remains largely unavoidable and where the true efficiencies lie.

How to Successfully Program an AI

Aggregated on: 2025-08-14 11:14:37

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming sectors like healthcare, finance, and education. In this scenario, knowing how to program an AI has become a strategic and highly valued skill. This guide brings clear, practical advice to help you develop an AI system from scratch. Whether you're just starting or already have some experience, the tips below will help you move forward with more confidence and efficiency. Making the right choices in tools, techniques, and data impacts your project's outcome. A well-built AI system depends on technical knowledge, structure, and consistency. Understanding each step and applying it the right way is key to building reliable and intelligent solutions.

Scheduler-Agent-Supervisor Pattern: Reliable Task Orchestration in Distributed Systems

Aggregated on: 2025-08-13 20:14:37

The Scheduler-Agent-Supervisor (SAS) pattern is a powerful architectural approach for managing distributed, asynchronous, and long-running tasks in a reliable and scalable way. It is particularly well-suited for systems where work needs to be orchestrated across many independent units—each capable of failing and retrying—while maintaining observability and idempotency. This pattern divides responsibilities into three well-defined roles:

Database Choices for Real-World Applications Cheat Sheet

Aggregated on: 2025-08-13 19:14:37

Choosing the right database is a crucial decision when designing software systems. While functional requirements can be met with any database, the real challenge lies in fulfilling non-functional requirements (NFRs) such as scalability, query performance, consistency, and data structure suitability. The database choice can significantly impact system efficiency, especially in large-scale applications. This article presents a comprehensive, structured approach to selecting the most suitable database for diverse real-world applications. It categorizes database choices based on data structure (structured, semi-structured, or unstructured), query complexity (simple lookups, complex joins, full-text search), and scalability requirements (small-scale applications to distributed, high-volume systems). By understanding these key factors, developers and architects can make informed decisions, ensuring optimal performance, reliability, and efficiency. The guide explores SQL and NoSQL databases, caching solutions, time-series databases, search engines, and data warehousing, providing practical insights into how different database technologies best serve specific use cases.

Designing Data Pipelines for Real-World Systems: A Guide to Cleaning and Validating Messy Data

Aggregated on: 2025-08-13 18:14:37

Many software systems involve processing a large volume of customer data every day. Access to customer data demands careful handling and responsibility. Maintaining data integrity is of utmost importance, particularly in highly regulated spaces where accurate data is necessary to deliver the highest standard of output. Additionally, since any data-driven decision is only as accurate as the data it’s based on, clean data is key to making well-informed business decisions. This guide dives into how we can sanitize raw data so it remains consistent, clean, and accurate within our own organizations.

Migrating from Monolith to Microservices Using PHP: A Step-by-Step Guide

Aggregated on: 2025-08-13 17:14:37

As businesses scale, monolithic architectures often start to crack under pressure. What once seemed like a simple, all-in-one structure turns into a bottleneck. The results? Slow down releases, complicated bug fixes, and making even minor updates feel risky.

I Vibe Coded a PC Builder Tool Using Grok AI: Here’s What I Learned Along the Way

Aggregated on: 2025-08-13 16:14:37

I'm sure you've heard of AI, and its sidekick: vibe coding. Yeah, it's a thing right now. The question is: Are you using it to create solutions to real-world problems and get paid for the value you provide? This is the story of how I leveraged the power of Grok AI and vibe coded my dream app: a PC Builder tool. Back in October 2021, I needed to build a tool that helps ordinary people build a PC without thinking of the technicalities involved. I had a blog I started in 2018, built around the PC hardware niche, and the traffic was failing (thanks to Google's incessant updates).

From Red to Resolution: How I Used AI to Diagnose and Recommend Fixes for Flaky Tests

Aggregated on: 2025-08-13 15:14:37

Introduction: The Flaky-Test Dilemma Nothing interrupts a CI/CD pipeline quite like an intermittent test failure. Over time, these “flaky” tests erode confidence in automation and become a drag on velocity. Industry data confirms the pain: a 2023 survey found that flaky tests account for nearly 5% of all test failures, costing organizations up to 2% of total development time each month [1]. When tests that once guarded quality instead generate noise, developers learn to ignore failures, and genuine defects can slip through unnoticed.

Software Security Treat or Threat? Leveraging SBOMs to Control Your Supply Chain Chaos [Infographic]

Aggregated on: 2025-08-13 14:59:37

Editor's Note: The following is an article written for and published in DZone's 2025 Trend Report, Software Supply Chain Security: Enhancing Trust and Resilience Across the Software Development Lifecycle. Software supply chain security is on the rise as systems advance and hackers level up their tactics. Gone are the days of fragmented security checkpoints and analyzing small pieces of the larger software security puzzle. Now, software bills of materials (SBOMs) are becoming the required norm instead of an afterthought. So the question is: Are supply chains and SBOMs a sweet pairing or a sticky solution?

Creating Serverless Applications With AWS Lambda: A Step-by-Step Guide

Aggregated on: 2025-08-13 14:14:37

Serverless architecture has reshaped application development by eliminating the need for direct infrastructure management, allowing developers to focus purely on writing and deploying code. AWS Lambda, one of the most widely used serverless computing services, lets you run backend code without provisioning servers. This tutorial will guide you through creating a simple serverless application using AWS Lambda and API Gateway. What Is Serverless Computing? Serverless computing allows your code to execute in response to events such as HTTP requests or file uploads, without the need to manage servers. With AWS Lambda, you are billed only for the time your code actually runs.

How to Know an Autonomous Driver Is Safe and Reliable?

Aggregated on: 2025-08-13 13:14:37

The race to deploy fully autonomous vehicles (AVs) is accelerating. Waymo has already reached over 250k trips per week while Tesla and Zoox are ramping up. The key question for scaling is not “Can AVs drive?” but “How to know AVs are safe and reliable at scale?” As developers, we live by a simple creed: if it’s not tested, it’s broken. We write unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests to gain confidence. But what happens when the 'test environment' is the unpredictable chaos of a public road, where an edge case can have severe repercussions?

Orchestrating Multi-Agents: Unifying Fragmented Tools into Coordinated Workflows

Aggregated on: 2025-08-13 12:14:37

Fragmented Tools Development teams are deploying specialized AI tools across different vendors, architectures, and environments. These tools exist in silos, creating operational complexity and limiting their collective potential. As AI adoption accelerates and the number of deployed agents multiplies, a new challenge emerges: how do we coordinate these specialized tools to work together effectively?

Secure Private Connectivity Between VMware and Object Storage: An Enterprise Architecture Guide

Aggregated on: 2025-08-13 11:29:37

As an architect, security is the first thing that comes to mind when defining an architecture for a customer. One of the key things that you need to keep in mind is minimizing the network traffic routed through the public internet. This article discusses how to bring private connectivity to cloud services, working with compute platforms like VMware on Cloud. Modern cloud architecture follows a "defense-in-depth" philosophy where network isolation forms the foundational security layer. Public internet exposure creates unacceptable risks for enterprise workloads handling sensitive data, financial transactions, or regulated content. Private connectivity addresses this by implementing a critical architectural principle: Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA).

Building a Scalable GenAI Architecture for FinTech Workflows

Aggregated on: 2025-08-12 20:14:36

Generative AI (GenAI) is rapidly transforming the financial services landscape. According to McKinsey, GenAI could unlock up to $340 billion in annual cost savings and productivity gains across the global banking sector. With this momentum, forward looking fintech leaders are embedding GenAI into critical workflows ranging from customer onboarding and credit decisioning to fraud detection and compliance. This article provides a practical architecture guide to help technology leaders adopt GenAI safely, effectively, and at scale. Why GenAI Matters for Financial Services Financial institutions are under constant pressure to operate faster, smarter, and leaner. GenAI provides a strategic edge by:

Implementing iOS Accessibility: A Developer's Practical Guide

Aggregated on: 2025-08-12 19:29:36

We iOS developers often spend weeks or even months building a well-crafted app with smooth animations, clever features, and polished UI down to the pixel. But there's one thing that gets often overlooked in the race to ship, and that's accessibility. It can help transform an already great app into something inclusive and exceptional. Supporting accessibility can sound like a nice-to-have; it's not just about helping people with disabilities (though that in itself is a good enough reason), but it's about building apps that everyone can use comfortably, regardless of how they interact with their device. Also, it's not that hard to implement, especially on iOS.

Real-Time Recommendations Powered by Spanner, BigQuery, and Vector Embeddings

Aggregated on: 2025-08-12 18:29:36

Product recommendation systems are an integral part of a wide range of industries like e-commerce, retail, media and entertainment, financial services, etc. Product recommendation is crucial for both providers and consumers as it improves the overall consumer experience and increases sales. Businesses collect and analyze a ton of consumer usage and behavior data to optimize their recommendations for purchase and user satisfaction. They strive to deliver these recommendations as soon as possible with the most up-to-date insights. Delays in showing relevant recommendations can result in lost sales and a bad experience for the consumer.

Deploying Real-Time Machine Learning Models in Serverless Architectures: Balancing Latency, Cost, and Performance

Aggregated on: 2025-08-12 17:29:36

Machine learning (ML) is becoming more and more important in real-time applications such as fraud detection and personalized recommendations. Due to their scaling capacity and the elimination of workload on infrastructure management, these applications are highly attractive for deployment in serverless computing. However, deploying ML models to serverless environments has unique challenges with latency, cost, and performance. In this article, we will describe these problems and provide a solution that makes it possible to successfully deploy real-time ML models into the serverless architecture.

Declarative Pipelines in Apache Spark 4.0

Aggregated on: 2025-08-12 16:29:36

The landscape of big data processing is constantly evolving, with data engineers and data scientists continually seeking more efficient and intuitive ways to manage complex data workflows. While Apache Spark has long been the cornerstone for large-scale data processing, the construction and maintenance of intricate data pipelines can still present significant operational overhead. Databricks, a key contributor to Apache Spark 4.0, recently addressed this challenge head-on by open-sourcing its core declarative ETL framework. This new framework extends the benefits of declarative programming from individual queries to entire data pipelines, offering a compelling approach for building robust and maintainable data solutions. The Shift From Imperative to Declarative: A Paradigm for Simplification For years, data professionals have leveraged Spark's powerful APIs (Scala, Python, SQL) to imperatively define data transformations. In an imperative model, you explicitly dictate how each step of your data processing should occur.

Scaling Playwright Test Automation: A Practical Framework Guide

Aggregated on: 2025-08-12 15:29:36

As web applications become increasingly dynamic and feature-rich, the complexity of ensuring their quality rises just as fast. Playwright has emerged as a powerful end-to-end testing tool, supporting modern browsers and offering capabilities like auto-waiting, multi-browser testing, and network interception. But writing isolated test cases is only a small part of successful automation. To support maintainability, collaboration, and long-term scalability, a structured test automation framework is essential.

Migrating Legacy VB6 Applications to Modern Platforms

Aggregated on: 2025-08-12 14:29:36

Many enterprises still run mission-critical systems written in Visual Basic 6.0 (VB6), a language whose support ended in 2008. This leaves them maintaining “legacy hell” environments: no patches, mounting security vulnerabilities, and shrinking expertise. For example, Stride reports that in nearly 40% of VB systems, the original source code is lost (developers retired, docs missing), and crucial logic is buried in decades-old stored procedures. These systems become compliance liabilities and block innovation. Modernizing them, by migrating to platforms like .NET or Java, reclaims value and future-proofs the software. Migrating VB6 is a major undertaking. Architects must choose between a pure rewrite, automated conversion, or a hybrid approach. We’ll explore real-world strategies, tools, and best practices for an architect facing a VB6 modernization project. The journey involves deep analysis of the legacy code, phased refactoring, extensive testing, and careful re-architecting into modular services.

Architecture Lessons from Two Digital Transformations

Aggregated on: 2025-08-12 13:14:36

I have been fortunate to lead not just one, but two digital transformation projects as an Architect. And I would say I got lucky under many different counts. First piece of luck – one of the projects was a failure! How can that be lucky you ask? Read on.

Scoped Values: Revolutionizing Java Context Management

Aggregated on: 2025-08-12 12:14:36

In an application meant for concurrent execution need of sharing data (or context) between threads is imperative. The available design choices are to pass the context as method parameter(s) or enable the context to be universally accessible (viz. global variable or equivalent). While former choice (i.e. context as method argument) is easiest it doesn’t scale well. As the application evolves, the context too grows and thus the method parameters. Moreover, the method is required to accept parameters which aren’t utilized by itself directly but instead some method deep down the call hierarchy. Thus, overall data flow isn’t clean or intuitive. In case the context is mutable any of the callee potentially could corrupt the context. Identifying this rouge behavior is unpleasant at best.

Do You Understand the Debt You Have to Pay?

Aggregated on: 2025-08-12 11:14:36

I was fortunate to start my career with people who truly cared about code quality. Early on, I learned why this matters and how continuous attention to quality positively impacts customer satisfaction. This experience made it natural for me to improve legacy code and constantly seek further enhancements. However, at the beginning of my journey, my perspective was narrow—I saw only the code. So, my efforts focused solely on refactoring. Fast forward to today, I've learned that there are many more ways to improve software. There are also several strategies you can explore to choose the right approach for your situation.

AWS Step Functions IDE Extension: A Game Changer, but What’s Next?

Aggregated on: 2025-08-11 20:29:37

If you’ve ever worked with AWS Step Functions, you know the struggle. Debugging workflows locally? A nightmare. Testing small changes? Deploy, wait, check logs, repeat. The experience has been far from smooth — until now. AWS just launched a Step Functions extension for VSCode, and it’s a huge step forward. But as great as this update is, one big question remains: why is this limited to VSCode? What about IntelliJ, Eclipse, and other IDEs?

Deploying a Scalable Golang Application on Kubernetes: A Practical Guide

Aggregated on: 2025-08-11 19:29:36

Golang is the finest programming language for constructing applications that can scale well and at high density due to the concurrency and performance inherent in the language itself. Kubernetes is the best standard for container orchestration, which gives a platform for deploying, managing, and scaling applications. Together, they constitute a formidable pair for creating unobtrusive and bulletproof microservices. This blog will lead readers through the process of deploying a scalable Golang application on Kubernetes, highlighting essential considerations alongside the more practical 'doing it' steps.

Development of System Configuration Management: Introduction

Aggregated on: 2025-08-11 18:14:36

Series Overview This article is part 1 of a multi-part series: "Development of system configuration management." The complete series: